The Loss of Native Language: Towards a Modern Post-Imperial Writing (Yeats and Joyce)
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Abstract
This article addresses the issue of language in colonial and post-colonial contexts and its role in delineating authentic features of national identity. The first part tackles African and Irish theorists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Douglas Hyde, whose views of clinging to the native tongue promote the politics of an essentialist identity. According to them, the loss of native language brings about feelings of inferiority and estrangement, which serves only to empower the colonizer. The article, then, proceeds to more tolerant writers who believe in the colonizer’s share in making the present, and favour hybrid identities. For them, it is impossible to reduce the poly-vocality of the moment into the too-familiar, too-reassuring fictions of the old days. Finally, this work focuses on the Irish context through Yeats and Joyce, who radically transformed the idea of ‘nation’ by theorizing for style as an agent of redemption from colonial artistic and political confines. Their cosmopolitan techniques allow the breakthrough of a new context, post-imperial writing. The loss of the native language, therefore, opens alternative artistic paths to experiment with the language of the colonizer, fostering a modern, cosmopolitan and always-already in the make “national” identity.
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non–Commercial No Derivatives License which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of the Publisher must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
